Kairos ICO Review and Token Analysis

Kairos ICO Overview

Facial recognition technology is increasingly implemented in a wide range of use cases. From security and identification provision to consumer data collection, the heightened adoption of the technology will see an estimated 7.76 billion dollar industry valuation by 2022. The Kairos ICO aims to be a large player in this field by bringing their unique facial identification technology onto the blockchain.

UPDATE: Recent developments have led to our downgrading of the Kairos ICO score. Kairos have refunded investors’ ETH without explanation, shut down their Telegram channel and remain unresponsive to inquiries pertaining to these issues. We have reduced their score accordingly for the lack of transparency surrounding the aforementioned circumstances and subsequent loss of support among the community.

Kairos ICO Value Proposition

Kairos is a tech company specializing in artificial intelligence and facial recognition. The Kairos ICO is an opportunity presented by Kairos to purchase both security and utility tokens for the onchain version of their existing facial recognition platform. The product itself utilizes computer vision and machine learning to recognize faces in videos, photos and the real-world.

The Kairos ICO cites migration of their product to the blockchain as a way to bring a number of improvements to their business model. The proprietary database on which the recognition software draws upon will be moved to a decentralized architecture that enables customers to organize, share, and collectively leverage the Kairos database. The decision to migrate to the blockchain also helps promote growth of the company and the ecosystem, as customers are incentivized to contribute faces and intelligence to the shared database. This incentivization of contributing data will help toward creating increasingly powerful algorithms that enhance the overall utility and effectiveness of the product.

The utility of Kairos is wide in scope in that the architecture is built off of three primary functions which a myriad of applicable use cases:

Identity – used for searching and verifying faces

Emotions – used for measuring sentiment and mood

Demographics– used for gathering demographic data on age, gender, and ethnicity

The above facets of the Kairos platform are collectively branded as “Human Analytics”, which can be used individually or in combination to gather insights about individuals as they interact with the real world. Kairos adds value to businesses not just by collecting valuable data on who customers are, but how they feel and react in response to stimuli and are a lone player in the facial recognition industry in this regard. This utility opens up access to an entire breadth of new data which can be used for improving businesses.

The tokenized Kairos architecture has two tokens on which it is based:

Kairos Security token (KAIROS) – provides a stake in the company

Kairos Utility / Identity token (FACE) – gas to power the platform

There will be no vesting for the utility token. However, the security token will be vested. Security token holders also receive 1 utility token, so their liquidity will come from the utility token. The purpose of the security tokens instead is meant as a long-term bet on the Kairos company.

Kairos ICO Team

Brian Brackeen has been CEO of Kairos since he founded the company 6 years ago. Prior to that, he spent two years at Apple as a Senior Project Manager. Brian also spent 7 years as a Senior Managing Consultant with IBM. He’s established an impressive track record for himself in the tech industry and demonstrated his talent for running a successful business, having raised millions of in VC and generated revenue for the company.

Cole Calistra is the CTO of Kairos. Cole is experienced in the realm of tech leadership. He has spent a total of 8 years as an enterprise architect with BJs and Ahold. Ben Virdee-Chapman is CDO of Kairos. Ben has had success as an entrepreneur, having co-founded and sold his own design consultancy. Prior to founding his own business, he spent 9 years in various capacities in the design industry.

As for advisors, CEO and Founder of Invest Ready, Herwig Konings, is on deck providing guidance to the team.

Kairos ICO Strengths and Opportunities

We like projects that have a demonstrated track record with their offline product. Kairos is a company that has been in existence for 6 years, raised millions in VC and deployed their product with large enterprises. While developing their product, Kairos acquired emotion analysis company, IMRSV, whose technology they incorporated into their own product to forge their unique “human analytics” branded product.

Their data would previously be nearly impossible to come by in a quantitative manner prior to the launch of this product. But use cases we have reviewed demonstrate the versatile potential for Kairos to add value to businesses by providing hitherto unattainable customer insight. A demo of Kairos’ ability to analyze the ethnic makeup of a person can be tested by clicking here.

Kairos ICO Weaknesses and Threats

The Kairos ICO team openly admits they face a difficult challenge ahead when it comes to competition. While the Kairos facial recognition platform does offer a number of features and utilities that go beyond those currently under development by big tech companies like Google, there is always the possibility these companies move to take over that space by developing similar tech. We do not underestimate the challenge posed by taking on tech giants, even when a product offered by a startup may be superior in many ways. Still, there are positive indications that the Kairos ICO is at least off to a good start, having made their inroads with large enterprise clients and already establishing themselves as a successful tech startup for a number of years.

The big advantage offered by an onchain facial recognition platform is the scaling and growth potential derived from a decentralized database architecture. The benefits this will bring enterprise customers compared to offchain products will be enormous and afford this comparatively small actor first-mover status on what we think is a particularly logical application of blockchain technology. How quickly and effectively Kairos is able to migrate to the blockchain and demonstrate the advantages of their onchain product will prove crucial on the road to beating out their competition and achieving large-scale adoption.

The Verdict on the Kairos ICO

With 6 years of operation behind them and large enterprise customers already utilizing their products, Kairos has proven to be a successful tech startup that is making a big impact on this emerging technology. While recognizing the challenges posed by competition from the tech giants, our rating positions the Kairos ICO well overall in the space. We are making a medium bet on the Kairos ICO.

The Kairos ICO has many indicators of a strong project. Six years of carving a niche in the facial recognition industry could give this ICO has an exceptionally strong springboard to launch from. However, because of the recent refund of investors' ETH and lack of communication/transparency from the team, we have downgraded Kairos to a pass.

About Our Methodology

The team at Crypto Briefing analyzes an ICO against ten criteria, as shown above.

These criteria are not, however, weighted evenly – our proprietary rating system attributes different degrees of importance to each of the criteria, based on our experience of how directly they can lead to the success of the ICO in question, and its token investors.

As always, please be careful when investing in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) as they can be highly speculative and offer few – if any – guarantees. It is sound practice to never invest more than you can afford to lose.

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Poor quality, weak, or inexperienced leadership can doom a project from the outset. Advisors who serve only to pad their own resumes and who have ill-defined roles can be concerning. But great leadership, with relevant industry experience and contacts, can make the difference between a successful and profitable ICO, and a flub.

If you don’t have a team willing and able to build the thing, it won’t matter who is at the helm. Good talent is hard to find. Developer profiles should be scrutinized to ensure that they have a proven history of working in a field where they should be able to succeed.

What is the technology behind this ICO, what product are they creating, and is it new, innovative, different – and needed?

The IOTA project is a spectacular example of engineers run amok. The technology described or in use must be maintainable, achievable, and realistic, otherwise the risk of it never coming into existence is incredibly high.

Tokens which have no actual use case are probably the worst off, although speculation can still make them have some form of value.

The best tokens we review are the ones that have a forced use case – you must have this token to play in some game that you will probably desire to play in. The very best utility tokens are the ones which put the token holder in the position of supplying tokens to businesses who would be able to effectively make use of the platforms in question.

There doesn’t have to be a market in order for an ICO to score well in this category – but if it intends to create one, the argument has to be extremely compelling.

If there is an existing market, questions here involve whether it is ripe for disruption, whether the technology enables something better, cheaper, or faster (for example) than existing solutions, and whether the market is historically amenable to new ideas.

Most ideas have several implementations. If there are others in the same field, the analyst needs to ensure that the others don’t have obvious advantages over the company in question.

Moreover, this is the place where the analyst should identify any potential weaknesses in the company’s position moving forward. For instance, a fundamental weakness in the STORJ system is that the token is not required for purchasing storage.

With many ICO ideas, the timing may be too late or too early. It’s important for the analyst to consider how much demand there is for the product in question. While the IPO boom funded a lot of great ideas that eventually did come to fruition, a good analyst would recognize when an idea is too early, too late, or just right.

Some of the least compelling ICO propositions are those that claim their founders will achieve some far-off goal, sometime in the future, just so long as they have your cash with which to do it.

More interesting (usually) is the ICO that seeks to further some progress along the path to success, and which has a clearly-identified roadmap with achievable and reasonable milestones along the way. Founders who are already partially-invested in their products are generally more invested in their futures.

Having a strong community is one of the fundamental building blocks of any strong blockchain project. It is important that the project demonstrates early on that it is able to generate and build a strong and empowered support base.

The ICO marketplace is becoming more crowded and more competitive. While in the past it was enough to merely announce an offering, today’s successful ICO’s work hard to build awareness and excitement around their offering.

One of the biggest factors weighing any analysis is price. The lower the price the more there is to gain. But too low of a price may result in an under capitalized project. It is therefore important to evaluate price relative to the individual project, its maturity and the market it is going after.

The total supply of tokens should also be justified by the needs of the project. Issuing a billion tokens for no reason will do nobody any good.

Our analysts employ a proprietary weighting system when evaluating and reporting on cryptocurrency Initial Coin Offerings. These consensus-weighted scores are then translated into a score from 1-100, and the final rating is an algorithmically-generated average of these post-weighted scores.

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